Grandfather’s kitchen was two steps down, so, of course, the water was deeper down there. But he got the bread. As he handed it over to us on the stairs, he said, ‘I won’t be a minute, I’m going back for something else.’ He’d seen this thing bobbing about in the water. Plomp, plomp, plomp. So he goes and gets it, and it’s a Christmas pudding! Mother always made extra to keep one for Easter!
[The people] opposite couldn’t get up their stairs, so they waded through the water to come over to us. My brothers opened the windows to let them in! They was soaked! [And] it wasn’t only from the river, it was from the dock. We had to find dry clothes for them [and], of course, we couldn’t sleep. The stench, it was vile. The doctor was coming for my dad, and my brothers got him on the plank raft.
‘What a good idea,’ he said.
Less exciting than rafting in a flood maybe but still valued were the acts of generosity, sometimes very simple, sometimes more dramatic, that people recalled as being an essential part of their everyday lives in a world which might have been less sophisticated but was remembered as being ‘better’.
There was a neighbourliness and a readiness to help those in need, from the simple cup of sugar to helping a family who had lost their home because of a fire. Many times I have seen a family being turned out of their home when getting behind with the rent. But neighbours never let them suffer for long. With temporary shelter found for them somewhere in the street, their bits and pieces of furniture looked after until they found another home, they got through.
But the existence of such an intimate community could have its drawbacks and, before the post-war slum clearances, life in the East End was lived in a much more public way. Not only were the living arrangements such that it was difficult for people not to know one another’s business, but more time was spent outside the home in the street. Such a way of life ensured you had company, allowed you to keep an eye on what the children were up to and let neighbours police the behaviour of any strangers who ‘turned up on their manor’. There were plenty of other reasons for spending time out of doors.
[Laughing]. It wasn’t exactly pleasant indoors, was it? You didn’t have big, comfortable three-pieces like you have now to lounge about on and watch the telly, and you was all living on top of one another in a couple of rooms, so you was better off outside, enjoying the company and not having to worry about the bugs!
*
It was how you passed a few pleasant hours. You’d have a talk and a laugh. Better than sitting indoors by yourself while the old man was up the pub and the kids were out mucking about in the street.
In the 1920s it was a wonderful experience living in the East End – you lived outside. Because of the cramped living conditions in the very small houses, and the lack of home amusements, we were all out in the streets, including the children, till late at night. The children were never outrageously misbehaved because the local policemen knew where we all lived.
This woman explained how, if you were in trouble of some kind, there was no question of keeping your problems to yourself, as the person you turned to for help would often be your neighbour.
You’d rally round if someone needed you. If someone was unwell you’d mind her kids, make sure she had a bit of grub, see to her washing for her, that sort of thing. You knew what was going on in people’s homes. It wasn’t like you were nosing or nothing, it was just that there was more of a together feeling. We was, like, you know, sort of all one. It was a good thing. Take my old aunt, she used to do everything for people down our turning. She’d deliver their babies and lay out anyone who’d died. She’d even cut your hair, and, how can I say, she’d help you out as well – if you was in the family way again and couldn’t afford to have another one. And it was helping you out in them days, when you couldn’t have another mouth to feed, cos you could hardly feed the ones you already had. People might think today that everyone knew your business, but that’s how it was. You didn’t have a lot of choice. Not round our way, you didn’t. You had to stick together. And it wasn’t a bad thing either.
The decency of a community really could make the difference between a family ‘getting by’ and not. A woman told me about a family who had moved into her street when she was a little girl. With them being recent arrivals, the neighbours had no idea that they were going without food to the point when they were literally starving. In desperation they had eaten something bad that one of the family’s many children had found somewhere, probably in the gutter after the local market had been packed away. The family, particularly the mother, became desperately ill. As soon as their new neighbours found out what had happened, they were taken under the community’s wing. She told me how the women in the street had rallied round and, despite their own poverty, provided food, organized a collection to pay for the doctor, and new and loyal friends had been made. The family were no longer alone, but were part of their new community.
This person recalled a similar decency, which, in her case, was extended to her own family.
They soon learned what problems my father had with my mum, and they simply surrounded him and did what they could to support him. I had dresses made for me by one person who was a dressmaker, and two elderly twins, who ran the Sunday School, regularly invited us to lunch or tea, where we had lovely home-made food. They saved their rations and made us meat pies, wonderful cakes and jam. It was like an extended family, without which we could not have survived.
Although there were instances when money was borrowed from the neighbours, it was most often practical help that was offered, as there wasn’t usually any spare cash to share round:
One time, Mum lent the family over the road a pair of Dad’s shoes. There was a wonderful feeling of belonging in that street. People would never close their door on you.
Whatever the help, it was appreciated:
People were very close. There was a sense of shame if you did something out of order, something bad, but there was no shame in being poor. We were all poor, you see. So, if you had to go next door and ask for something to help you out till the end of the week, it was accepted. You might borrow a saucepan of stew or half a loaf. You’d go home with it wrapped in a tea-cloth or in your apron. And you’d appreciate it, having something like that. And who knows, it might be their chap who was out of work next week.
People being so ‘close’ would probably feel claustrophobic to us today, with our more private, increasingly solitary lives, but, as people were usually living in shared, overcrowded housing, the proximity of others and the consequent lack of privacy were taken for granted. It was a lifestyle which provided good opportunities for sharing news.
The postman was friendly, knew you all and would tell you, ‘You have a letter’ from such and such a place or a postcard. He would tell you what it said.
And the shared supervision of children was another bonus.
If I can explain it like this: in them times, the community policed itself. They looked out for one another, so, in your own little community, you made sure that nothing too bad happened. [Laughing] And it was harder for kids to play the hop. If one of your ‘aunties’ [female neighbours] saw you hanging about when you should have been at school, they wouldn’t look the other way. ‘What you doing here?’ they’d say. ‘Why ain’t you at school? I’ll tell your mother of you. Now go on, off you go!’
My youngest was a bit on the slow side, but he still played out in the street with the other kids. You could let them do that back then. There’d always be a few mums sitting on the step or on the window sill having a natter, so there’d always be someone to keep an eye on him, if I was indoors getting on with my jobs. They wouldn’t let the others take too many liberties with him or nothing.
*
Being part of a tight-knit community did not have to be intrusive; you could still set boundaries between yourself and the neighbours.
There were those who were forever popping in and out of each other’s houses. It suited some, but we weren’t all like that. W
e were still friendly, very, but I didn’t like people coming over my step and knowing my business. I’d have someone in for a friendly cup of tea, of course, but not all the time. Not like some.
Although the boundaries were not always very formal, there were still expectations about taking part in the life of the neighbourhood.
People didn’t shut their front doors because it was usually shared accommodation, so you had to have the front door open. But the front door was also left open because your neighbour would say, ‘I’ll come round and have a cup of tea with you at four o’clock.’ So you’d leave it open so you wouldn’t have to bother to go and open it. You’d be expecting them. And the children, they could just [run in and out]. I think if you didn’t ask your neighbours for help, they used to think you were being standoffish.
Not all local characters were popular within their communities. Just as now, there were people who were considered less suitable than others to be around children, but there was also a tolerance of such people which today’s sometimes overly anxious parents might find alarming.
There was this one bloke, he talked a bit posh, but he was dooky [dirty] and he shuffled about in these old clothes. I don’t know how he come to be living round there. Anyway, he had all these books and always had sweets and he would talk to all the kids. Our mums warned us he was a bit funny and that we had to watch him. I don’t think he’d ever have dared touch us. He knew our mums would have killed him if he did, never mind what our dads would have done to him. But I don’t think there was ever any thought that we’d get him out of the street or drive him away.
There were some peculiar people around, though they were really harmless, just unusual. ‘Lavender Liz’, who lived at the top of the street, and ‘Dirty Wally’, who went round wearing a straw boater and an old baize tablecloth like a skirt.
But it wasn’t all sympathetic tolerance, and antisocial behaviour could easily spark off a quarrel among the more excitable members of the community.
Some people, to save the expense [of the sweep], would set fire to the chimney, a dangerous thing to do, and the whole street would be covered in soot and the washing ruined. [That] was the cause of many rows, and while there was this neighbourliness in most streets, there was the odd family feud between next-door neighbours. [Although] we mostly lived in harmony, each street had its noisy family, its dirty one, dodgy and sometimes downright dishonest ones. But everyone knew everyone else and mostly made allowances.
Or it might even provoke a full-blown fight.
Us kids would be having a street battle – our turning against one round the corner – it was our entertainment. [Laughing] We’d have sticks and stones as weapons, and dustbin lids as shields. And one of the kids would get a wallop off one of you that was a bit too hard, and he’d go running off home, and, before you knew it, his mother would be round after your mother, shouting the odds and threatening all sorts. Then the old girls’d roll up their sleeves and away they’d go! Fight like cats, they would. Mean it and all. That was as entertaining for us kids as having the fight among ourselves. But you’d have to be careful, you had to time it right, or you’d wind up getting a wallop from your mum when she’d finished. So you had to have it away on your toes, a bit slippery like, afterwards. Hide till it had all died down, or till your mum was too busy fretting over one of your brothers for something he’d been up to. It was funny when you think about it. [Laughing] They’d be fighting over one of us getting hurt, and one of us doing the hurting, protecting their kids, you see, but then you’d both cop a fourpenny one from your mum as well! It always blew over though. Even after a proper fight, they’d be talking to one another like nothing happened a couple of days later, or even having a cup of tea together.
There were, however, some individuals who were not welcome in the community at all, never mind into the back kitchen for a cuppa. The woman speaking next came to east London from a rather more demure community in Sussex with her policeman husband. She is describing the period immediately after the war, when the bomb sites, decay and dereliction on her husband’s beat had attracted a new group of residents – those who traded in vice and crime. Cable Street had a thriving, if downmarket, red-light district, with all-night cafés patronized by pimps who sat drinking coffee, while their ‘girls’ did the business with the passing trade, many of them long-distance lorry drivers working the docks and markets, whose vehicles lined the narrow streets nearby. While the cafes were the meeting places, the alleys and railway arches acted as the brothels.
His station was in Leman Street – an extremely tough area, where all the toms, as they were called, were. I can remember going to meet him or see him in the afternoon, when he was on late turn. We used to meet at the corner of one of the streets off the Whitechapel Road where there was a bombed-out church. I used to be petrified if I got there before him, because there weren’t only the prostitutes, there were all the meths drinkers sitting around in the churchyard.
It was even harder for those who were expected to live in the middle of it all.
It was never much of a place round there, not exactly what you’d call posh, and we might not have had much, but we was respectable families. To see them trollops hanging around the place, it was disgusting. Not right.
But the East End could be tougher still for outsiders, and more so for those who came from further afield than the policeman’s wife. During the First World War, there was mounting hostility against Germans, and retailers with German names, whose families had lived in their communities for two, maybe three generations, had to do their best to deflect the anger; having ‘The owner is a British subject’ inscribed on the lintel above a shop doorway was not unusual. But it still wasn’t enough to prevent animosity from spilling over into action, and there were several incidents of local shopkeepers having their businesses smashed up and looted by their neighbours.
I’m not making excuses, but there was bad feeling. We were at war, you see. And even though I was little more than a baby myself, I still knew that we all hated the Germans. Got it from my older brothers and my mum and dad, but I suspect I was too young to know what a German really was.
It wasn’t only the effects of wartime and of anti-German propaganda that could cause trouble within a community. Between the wars, a letter in the East End News from someone who signed himself ‘J. B. of Bow E3’ talked of ‘coloured pests’ who are ‘swarming into this country’ and are touching food on market stalls with their ‘paws’. And, in 1920, the Evening News ran a piece on ‘the Lure of the Yellow Man’ holding a ‘fatal fascination for English girls’ who would commit ‘moral suicide’ if they visited Pennyfields, which is ‘peopled almost exclusively by Chinese, Japanese and coloured men’ and is ‘the distributing centre for opium and cocaine’. The newspaper actually suggested that there should be ‘a cordon round this area of London and [people should] forbid any white women from frequenting it’.
There has probably never been a time when prejudice of one kind or another did not exist – the act of prejudging is something we are all guilty of at some time – but different cultures have, on the whole, managed to rub along together in the East End more or less successfully over the years. There is a prejudice, however, regarding the supposedly dubious nature of the cockney which I experienced, and which embarrassed the unthinking perpetrator far more than it did me.
I was visiting a farm as part of my research for a book on hop-picking when it was explained to me – as a historian from a respectable university – that hand-picking of the hops had finished at the farm when a flash flood destroyed the huts, which had proved an ideal opportunity for bringing in machine-harvesting. The woman who was telling me this said what a relief it had been to be rid of all the ‘cockney scum’ who had come annually for hopping. When I said that I used to go hopping as a child, she immediately replied – red-faced – that we cockneys were, in fact, the ‘salt of the earth’.
Even people who have chosen to work in the East End can have ‘robust�
�� views on cockneys, as this respondent discovered when she was looking for employment.
I didn’t grow up in the East End, it was really a job opportunity which brought me here [getting solicitor’s articles]. I had thirteen interviews. It just coincided that the last one was in the East End and they were the ones who offered me the job. One of the partners told me they offered it to me because my CV showed I had worked for about a year in a psychiatric unit, so they thought I could deal with their sort of loony clients.
How people spoke about their feelings towards any new arrivals who came into their community varied, of course, according to their direct experience, but, when talking about their feelings regarding present-day immigrant groups, there were frequent, similar comments along the lines of:
The Jews, now they were OK. They mixed in. They were more like us. They mixed in. Not like the ones today.
Such memories are not, however, supported by contemporary evidence, which shows the concerted efforts of the Jewish establishment as they did their best to pressurize the Ashkenazi refugees to blend in with their host community. A person who is himself from an immigrant family had the following thoughts.
The Jewish immigrants who lived around here – at the time of my parents’ youth, I mean – were more prepared, or maybe encouraged, to integrate, I think, even if they did keep their own customs in the home and in their worship. But current groups of immigrants, people from my sort of background say, too many of them want a separate community. They’re imposing a way of life on the area rather than becoming part of it. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. I get confused, can see both sides. I appreciate some of the old values, but I think keeping yourself too separate can make you a target for prejudice, even violence or hatred. It’s difficult. Very difficult.
My East End Page 11